Debate on Brazil’s president future slogs on into the night after months of turmoil

New York Times

May 11, 2016

Photo: Felipe Dana / Associated Press

Brazilians who support President Dilma Rousseff shout during clashes with police on the lawn outside the Senate as senators debated whether to impeach her.

Brazilians who support President Dilma Rousseff shout during...

Even before the speeches were finished, the votes cast and her fate sealed, a common conclusion had already settled in the halls of President Dilma Rousseff’s palace Wednesday: The party’s over.

With a mixture of grim resignation and a dash of gallows humor, aides said some of them had already stopped working; they were now too busy looking for new jobs. Others even seemed a little relieved. At least the long battle was almost over.

As for Rousseff, who has publicly vowed to keep fighting the “coup mongers” engineering her ouster, her office issued only a cryptic description of her schedule: “Internal meetings.”

Just a short stroll from her palace, the Senate was debating whether to suspend Rousseff and place her on trial, the culmination of months of tirades, secret maneuvering and legal appeals in the campaign to impeach her.

“I’m convinced that there is more than enough proof of her crimes,” said Marta Suplicy, a senator from São Paulo who was Rousseff’s ally before defecting from her leftist Workers’ Party.

Even some of Rousseff’s supporters in the Senate expected her to lose the vote, which would oust the Workers’ Party from the presidency for the first time in 13 years.

“There is no other path for us than opposition,” Humberto Costa, the Workers’ Party leader in the Senate, told reporters during the session Wednesday. Still, he said, it would be a “very firm opposition.”

Senator after senator announced their plans to vote against Rousseff. After nearly 12 hours, fewer than half the 70 senators slated to speak Wednesday had made their addresses, sparking predictions that the vote probably would not come until early today, the Associated Press reported.

The Senate vote is a watershed in the power struggle consuming Brazil, a country that experienced a rare stretch of stability over the past two decades. Now, those gains are unraveling. Brazil is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, huge corruption cases across the political spectrum and a bitter feud among its scandal-plagued leaders — just months before the world heads to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics.

If Rousseff is suspended and put on trial, she would become the second of Brazil’s four elected presidents to be removed from office since democracy was re-established in the mid-1980s after a long dictatorship. She already lost a vote last month in the lower house of Congress, which advanced the impeachment proceedings to the Senate. Powerful lawmakers fending off their own graft charges led the effort against her.

“Plainly said, this is the worst crisis in our history, with its combination of economic calamity, discredited politics and the violation of the lowest ethical standards,” historian Boris Fausto told reporters this month.

Rousseff faces accusations that she borrowed money from state banks to plug budget holes. Her opponents say she used this strategy to hide Brazil’s economic problems, in an attempt to increase her re-election prospects.